At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life

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Lending his name to the term sadism, and synonymous with pornography and sexual perversion, the infamous Marquis de Sade was inarguably mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But the very qualities that were repellent in the man make for fascinating reading in Francine du Plessix Gray's biography, At Home with the Marquis de Sade. The pitfalls of writing about such a scandalous subject are obvious: Sade is so completely associated in the modern mind with extremely degrading sexual escapades that any book about him risks being tarred with the same prurient brush--how does one discuss the Marquis without mentioning such loaded topics as whipping, sodomy, masturbation, blasphemy, or orgies, for example? The answer is, one doesn't; but Gray's focus in this biography is less on Sade's sexuality than on his relationship with the two most influential women in his life: his wife, Pélagie, and his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil.

It seems even a sadist can love, and in his own way, the Marquis de Sade loved his wife. Even more remarkable is that Pélagie apparently returned his affection devotedly for many years, despite frequent scandals, jailings, and even an affair with her own sister. Gray draws extensively on letters written by Sade, his wife, and his mother-in-law to paint a vibrant picture of an unorthodox marriage, a period of great political upheaval, and a complicated bond between mother and daughter. Gray also places the Marquis's writing in a context that, while forthrightly characterizing it as "the crudest, most repellent fictional dystopia ever limned, the creation of a borderline psychotic whose scatological fantasies have grown all the more deranged in the solitude and rage of his jail cell," also acknowledges its "recklessness and daring" as well as its influence on later writers from Swinburne and Baudelaire to Octavio Paz and Luis Buñuel. Sex, art, religion, and politics--At Home with the Marquis de Sade addresses them all with the intelligence and insight one has come to expect from Francine du Plessix Gray.

Book Description

A remarkable and unparalleled portrait of the Marquis de Sade and the two women who endured his peculiar genius

Much has been written about the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), the flamboyant aristocrat whose years indulging in sexual aberrations inspired his celebrated works 120 Days of Sodom and Justine--and landed him in the Bastille. However, scant attention has been paid to the two women who were closest to him: Renee Pelagie de Sade, his adoring wife, and his powerful mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil.

Francine du Plessix Gray draws on thousands of pages of letters exchanged by the married couple, few of which have been published before in English, to explore in the fullest historical and psychological detail what it was like to be married to one of the most maverick spirits of modern history. Gray brings to life two remarkable women and their complex relationship to Sade as they dedicated themselves to protecting him from the law, curbing his excesses, and ultimately confining him. With immediacy, irony, and verve, At Home with the Marquis de Sade also conjures up the extravagant hedonism and terror of late eighteenth-century France.

"At Home with the Marquis de Sade is not the first full-length life of Sade in English, but it is most likely to remain the best." --Chicago Tribune

"Boldly imaginative. . . . The long-suffering spouse of history's most infamous rake becomes a praiseworthy enabler of greatness." --The New York Times Book Review

* A New York Times Notable Book

* A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998 and a finalist for the Salon Book of the Year

* A Book-of-the-Month Club and a Quality Paperback Book Club Selection

Customer Reviews:

The Sorrowful Sade.......2006-05-16

Strangely, though it is from him that the word sadism is derived, I found it no torment to read this delightful book. There are many myths around the Marquis de Sade, as he has always been more talked about then read. This biography shows us a gentler side of the man by focusing upon his relationships with the women in his life. Though he could be cruel like any of us, his "crimes" pail in comparison to those of many of his contemporaries. What I find interesting about the Divine Marquis is not so much the writings as the energy of the man himself. Sade was almost incapable of restraint, except when it came to saving his own skin. When locked away behind prison walls and unable to gratify his desires in the flesh, he turned to the pen to pour those energies onto paper. Called "the freest spirit who ever lived" by Apollinaire, Ms. Gray shows us the great lesson of such freedom, the necessity of compromise in civilized life. In his last years, in a letter to an old friend he writes: "I am not happy, but I am well." How many of us, thwarted in our dreams and desires, might say the same?

Fair, focussed and informative........2005-09-22

Francine Gray has humanized Sade for us. The full description of his activities prior to his arrest,as given by Gray, confirms what Sade says of himself,"I am a libertine: I have conceived everything one can conceive in that genre, but I've surely not done all I've imagined and surely will never do it.." Sade was a visionery of cruel and convoluted sex. As regards the use of whips and Cat-'o'-nine tails and sodomy, he was only following the style of his contemporary aristocrats, a way of life which treated prostitites and the lower orders as captive booty, like the nubile black slave girls were treated in the South here till the Civil war.That way of life amongst the French Aristocracy .seems to have continued at least till the twenties of the last century- see Proust's portrayal of the proclivities of Baron Charlus in the last volume of his 'Remembrance of Things Past' ['In Search of last Time' in the recent Penguin Edition]. The description of the French Revolution by Madame Sade is an insider's account of the cataclysm. The black tid-bits about the leaders of the French Revolution, - Mirabeau [incest with his sister and writing erotica] and Danton, ['who read Justine to masturbate']are quite revealing and also raise the question how it is that lechers and the morally defecient become leaders of rabble or are chosen as such by the rabble.Francine could have analysed what exactly was the attraction Sade had for women of all types- the intellectual Milli Rousset, the beautiful Anne Launay,his sister-in-law, the uneducated Constance and others.The book is, on the whole, a great read. B.T.Sampath

More about the women and not the man...........2005-01-10

When I first started reading this, it seemed more about the women (his mother and wife) than the Marquis. So, I read further to prove myself wrong.....not very successful. I had read another reveiw about this book that said the author sounded like a mother chastising her son; that sounded pretty close to what I read from the book. When it comes to the Marquis de Sade, I beleive that the author should have a presence, but not a(n) seemingly overbearing/opinionated one like in this book. I didnt finish it; after a few pages I realized this was not what I was looking for: something about the Marquise de Sade, not the women in his life.
If you want some type of psychoanalysis-biography of de Sade( which I want) this isn't it. It seems well researched, just not about the right subject.

The letters of Life.......2004-07-18

This is a very good book that pulls no punches about Sade but does not condemn him either. It is a facinating story told through Sade's letters and it breaths life into this strange and brilliant man. The book does not enter into any of the complex theoretical debate that surround Sade so it can be read simply as a facinating story of a facinating man. But it is by no means simplistic and is a good primer for anyone who might want to enter the catacomb of Sade theorists. Read and enjoy. Ruminate and reflect.

In the Gray..............2004-07-16

The art of biography is a tricky one indeed. The biographer must make the subject come alive, while keeping him/herself far in the background. Unfortunately for 'At Home With the Marquis De Sade,' one often learns more about Francine Du Plessix Gray and her prejudices than about the Mad Marquis. To be fair though, De Sade is dangerous territory for the biographer. So much has been heaped around the myth that the truth about the man may never come to light.

Gray does admirable work with her sources though. Page after page, she unindates you with quotes from Sade's voluminous correspondence. The Alphonse-Donatien de Sade that emerges from these letters is one of a spoiled and self-centered child ignored by his profligate father and cold, unloving mother. Gray traces Sade's development into an imperious adolescent whose arrested childhood spurs him to find love and acceptance at the expense of others. The young nobleman inflicts painful whippings and other brutalities on a variety of servant girls and prostitutes. Sade's defense of his behavior underlies the inhumanity of the Ancien Regime. They were 'whores' and deserved no better. Gray brilliantly shows the connection between Sade's aristocratic snobbery and his casual disdain for those below him on the social ladder. With the arrival of the Revolution, the Terror and eventually, Napoleon, Sade finds himself playing the political chameleon in a continous effort to escape the blade and free himself from prison.

Thoroughout the book, Gray looks upon her subject rather bemusedly. Horrified at his misogyny and cruelty, she appears skeptical, if not downright cynical towards his occasional outbursts of kindness. In Gray's opinion, Sade was an overgrown child who never grew up to learn the fundamental lesson of 'civilization,' that of controlling our individual passions for the good of the whole. This Freudian-inspired thesis underscores the whole work, where Gray acts like the condescending aunt to a naughty nephew.

The strongest link in the book is Gray's examination of the women in Sade's life, foremost, his docile, all-forgiving wife, Pélagie, and his conformist, propriety-mongering drill sergeant of a mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. We get a sense of Sade's relationship with women, caught between the Scylla of Pélagie's adoring meekness and the Charybdis of the Madame's censuring strictness. Sade navigated his whole life between these two extremes, worshipping the one, loathing the other. But to view women as equal, suffering human beings just like himself was impossible. Sade needed both the angel and the harpy.

Where Gray's psychoanalysis proves weakest is with the discussion of Sade's complex and confused sexuality. She never really addresses the question of where his desire fit in. Homosexual? Bisexual? Heterosexual? Pansexual? Sade seemed to include all at once. Whilst such terms were the product of the 19th century, Gray remains silent on where to put the Marquis. Instead, she, like her Enlightenment predecessors, focuses on the sexual acts of Sade's varied repetoire: masturbation, flagellation and of course, 'sodomy,' which she incorrectly attributes to anal sex alone. Even more importantly, she never explores the reason for his being burned in effigy after his bisexual orgy in Marseilles which set him down the road of infamy. He was sentenced to death for having sex with a man, his valet, not for the horrible cruelties inflicted upon two young prostitues. The Ancien Regime tolerated the abuse of women while condemning the 'crime' of homosexuality. And herein lies a key to further examining the Marquis. Were his shocking exploits and even more outlandish writings the outlet of sexual energies he could only express at the pain of death? Gray includes nothing about this paranoid homophobia of Ancien Regime France and of European history as a whole. Instead, she rests her case on the very questionable thesis that civilization is the only bulwark against barbarity. Two devilish European wars of destruction might prove otherwise. Perhaps civilization's 'necessary suppression' breeds the seeds of barbarity itself.

Such questions and many more are left to the reader's musings, while the troubled Marquis never really leaves the page. Gray imprisons him once more in a quagmire of 'original' materials, while the man himself silently rattles his chains at us. 'At Home With the Marquis De Sade' journeys down the hitherto unexplored side-streets of the 'divine' marquis' existence, but ultimately fails to bring him to life. For that, I guess we'll have to wait.

Average customer rating:
At Home with the Marquis de Sade: a Life
Francine du Plessix Gray
Manufacturer: Penguin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000O3TWEI

Average customer rating:
At Home With the Marquis De Sade: A Life
Francine du Plessix Gray
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJ1RDQ

Average customer rating:
At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life
Francine Du Plessix Gray
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000K4SV9S

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Yogi Berra: An American Original recalls the legendary life and times of one of America's most enduring personalities. Drawn from the archives of the New York Daily News, this book represents the most complete collection of Yogi Berra materials ever published. With over 150 classic photographs, Yogi's Hall of Fame career is captured in beautiful detail -- including rarely seen pictures from his early years in Yankee pinstripes to his World Series heroics on the great Yankee teams of the 1950s and early 1960s, through his ups and downs as manager and coach of the tradition-rich Yankees and the upstart Mets, and concluding with his life after baseball.

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Cannes: Fifty Years of Sun, Sex & Celluloid : Behind the Scenes at the World's Most Famous Film Festival
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Cannes: Fifty Years of Sun, Sex & Celluloid : Behind the Scenes at the World's Most Famous Film Festival
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Manufacturer: Miramax
ProductGroup: Book
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Best of Classic Themes 1: Elementary to Early Intermediate
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Customer Reviews:

One of the Best Books on Papermaking by Hand.......2005-04-02

Packed with inspiration, how-tos, details, instructions & great images. A must for every papermaking and papier maché library - pulp painting, pulp spraying, sculptural techniques with paper. Wow!

Beautiful!.......2002-06-01

This wonderfully illustrated book examines the history of papermaking and also outlines step-by-step instructions for creating distinct handmade paper.

A wonderful resource book for any paper enthusiast!

Delight yourself making handmade paper.......2000-05-11

One of the most interesting books I have ever seen.This is a very important book for all the people who makes handmade paper.In this book we can find since how to make a papyrus sheet, one of the most antique techniques of making paper, till paper sculpture, a very actual and sophisticated work.The explanation about the way to do is simple and detailed, and the photos are very clear, so we can compare the final results when we try to experiment what author proposes.

A great source for creative use of papermaking techniques.......1998-08-24

This book is one of our favourites - we have nearly 30 books on the subject ! There are plenty of photos of processes and enough information to get anyone with a creative bent well on their way. Photos of a range of artists' works give additional inspiration and a good glossary gives the beginner a sound grasp of papermaking terms. Definitely recommended as a book all aspiring papermakers and paper artists should have.

Artisticamente bien presentado, una gran ayuda........1998-07-28

He tenido la oportunidad de revisar esta publicación, soy ingeniero especialista en celulosa y papel, consultor para proyectos de esta indole a nivel latinoamérica, sugiero que en una proxima publicación se expliquen los fundamentos fisicos, quimicos , de manera que el lector pueda establecer los parámetros de control a cada uno de los proyectos.

Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations
Average customer rating:

Definitely not a masterpiece

The Best Yet

Don't hesitate...

Insightful!

A MUST read for all KMer

Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations
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Manufacturer: Capstone
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Today, no one is, nor can be, an expert in everything. In every challenge, it is easy to feel that you don't know enough to keep up with the accelerating pace of change inside our organisations, let alone the world outside. Start with the assumption that somebody somewhere has already done what you are trying to do. How can you find out whom, and learn from them? Learning to Fly shows exactly how to put knowledge management theory into practice, sharing the tools used and the experience and insights gained by two leading practitioners.

Completely updated for the second edition, Learning to Fly shares the authors’ experiences from BP and other leading knowledge organisations.and incorporates new material on implementation and best practice, including a CD-ROM with KM tools and exercises.

“Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell show how new ideas and tools are making working and learning inseparable.” Peter Senge.

Customer Reviews:

Definitely not a masterpiece.......2006-03-31

Learning to Fly is fairly useful as a general overview of knowledge management principles, but it is far from great.

First, it doesn't quite live up to the promise made in the blurb: 'Learning to Fly shows exactly how to put theory into practice'. For one thing, there's very little theory in the book, which is not necessarily a bad thing -- just don't expect to gain a deeper understanding of the discipline by reading this book. But even the practical guidelines are a bit shallow and don't always give the reader a very clear idea of how things can be implemented.

Take, for instance, the crucial point of how to get started, presented in chapter 12 ('Embedding it in the organization', the second-to-last chapter). Here's all the authors have to say about the 'starting' stage (pp. 170-171):

"Starting with something simple. Applying one of the tools and techniques in this book to address a simple part of the issue is a good start. Demonstrating a 'quick win' is important to gain the interest and commitment of the team. If they see that these techniques can be applied, without spending too much time on them, to deliver some tangible results, then they are likely to come back for more. We have found it best to introduce some formality after this stage into the planning. What specifically will be done, what are the costs and the benefits and will the team commit some resources to it?"

That's it. They don't suggest, or give an example of, what might constitute a 'simple part of an issue' that could be used for a quick, low-cost demonstration. Since all the useful tools and techniques mentioned in the book have to do with changing the way a whole team, if not the whole organization, works, I would very much like to be given an example of how a 'quick win' can be accomplished. Surely not by suggesting a peer assist that will mobilize a bunch of people for a whole day -- management will never agree to that if they can't see the value of KM to start with.

Second, the book is written in an informal style that is probably supposed to give it a down-to-earth, let's-get-our-hands-dirty feel. But it's actually just not very well written and even more poorly edited (as evidenced by numerous ungrammatical bits like 'at the time when it most useful' and 'who are the people are involved') which, together with the shoddy typography, reveal overall carelessness and subpar organization.

Last, there's a lot of white space surrounding each paragraph, so the 220 pages could probably easily fit into 120 or so well laid-out pages.

The bottom line: U$25 is a steep price to pay for just okay contents packaged in a poorly designed paperback.

The Best Yet.......2004-01-16

Very down-to-earth, applicable guidelines for building a learning environment within an organization. Focuses on tools and techniques and difficult issues of embedding habits of sharing/learning.
I've read a lot of knowledge management books and this is the one our organization is using as a "starting point" for our efforts.

Don't hesitate..........2002-09-05

...trust me and the other reviewers. you will have to wait for a long time to come across another book equally informative, full of sound practical advice, and entertaining. proceed to check-out now.

Insightful!.......2002-02-18

The knowledge management craze may be passing right before our eyes, but Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell do a good job explaining what's behind all the hype. Although a bit dry in tone, the authors manage to capture the critical elements of KM and explain the whys and hows as they relate to individual businesses. Despite a somewhat sterile presentation, we from getAbstract recommend this book as a thorough introduction to knowledge management theory and practice.

A MUST read for all KMer.......2002-01-22

A uniquely entertaining book, Learning to Fly is written with the right blend of theory and practice. From the start, Collison & Parcell build an honest and caring relationship with the reader that takes you on a journey of understanding the why and the how of knowledge management (KM).

The Chris & Geoff hit on many key issues imperative to a successful knowledge management implementation -

·KM should be focused on business results for business objectives. Emphasizing the importance that organizations don't loose sight of why they are doing KM.

·The explanation of KM as an unconscious competence is an excellent model for organization to use for a self-assessment and then strive to achieve.

·Applying KM holistically through the model of learning before, during and after. Proving that building a learning organization is at the heart of KM.

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